HD with bad sectors??

[XprincoX]

I was just running scandisk on my ibm HD and it found 3.5 MB of bad sectors!! So is it safe to keep on using the drive or should i replace it immediately? Its also making a nasty scratching noise, when it seems to be reading those bad sectors..... :eek:

[Dark Illusion]

Back up your work NOW. Bad sectors seem to like to grow exponentially. Soon enough the whole drive will be dead. I'd recommend you RMA the current one, meanwhile backup your data somewhere.

[KILLorBE]

Is it a 75GXP?
Doesn't really matter but you might wanna try a format (seems to help, but even if it helps you'll probably have to do it every 2 or 3 months).
I would RMA it.

[XprincoX]

Yea i've formatted it multiple times, but sometimes when data is writen on one of them bad sectors i'll get a drive redundency error... And this drive was a spare from my old computer so im kinda SOL for RMAing it.. The bad sectors also appear to be in a distinct pattern as tho there was a straight scratch on the disk.

And no its not the 75GXP, its the Deskstar 40 gig. :D

[PsycoPhreak]

I had a drive go bad on me like that once (so i thought at first), when i'd scan it, the bad sectors would look to be in some sort of a pattern, so I took it a step further and decided to take off the controller board of the drive and clean the small pins and contacts on it (figured what the hell, if its goin bad, i'm not going to hurt it any worse). After getting it back together (and lookin brand spankin new i might add...:D ) I put it back into my system just to see if anything was different...fdisked it, full format..sure enough!!! the bad sectors were gone! seems as though some of the contacts were becoming oxidised from the humidity and heat and creating bad signals and the cleanup job did the trick. Give it a shot, what have ya got to loose? :cool:

[XprincoX]

what did ya use to clean it with? some rubbing alcohol?

P.S. but that still wouldn't explain the loud scratching noise, so i think there really is some physical damage... :(

[PsycoPhreak]

I used a number of different things to clean it, glass plus to wipe it down and git all the dirt off (it evaporates fast) and I used either Alchohol or Acetone ( can't remember at the moment) to clean all the pins and small contacts, and the ones that looked a bit rough I used an Exacto knife to very gently scrape the contacts until they were either their normal shiny silver or gold color. As far as the noise you hear when the drive is in use, its probably the heads moving back and forth from the bad sector to the FAT, trying to read from it, all drives do it if theres a bad sector, they will try to read it several times before reporting an error.

P.S.) see if you can get your hands on a LOW LEVEL format program from the Manufacturer of the drive, these proprietary programs usually support relocating a bad sector permanently or they update the drive to skip over using any bad sectors, resulting in a normal working drive again, although it might have a slightly smaller capacity afterwards, (depending on how many bad sectors, can be as little as 1 Mb to as large as the drive, depends on how much space is bad already.)

Hope this helped ya, just remember, it ain't dead until you throw it against the wall :D

[XprincoX]

have any idea where i could get the low level format program? WD seems to have removed it off there site... :(

[XprincoX]

nm found em :http://melrom.com/drivers.htm :D

[Mick]

go to ibm's site and d-l drive fitness test it will format drive and correct bad sectors will also give an error code so if rma is called for ibm will know why.